The (re-) appropriation of Pop Art as an international movement is experiencing a resurgent moment. Until 3rd March, the Saatchi Gallery is presenting a major exhibition: ‘Post Pop: East Meets West’, exploring Pop art since the 1960s. This show gathers artists from around the globe whose artistic vision has been formed partly in response to the Pop aesthetic. The 256 works on display have been arranged thematically rather than by nation or chronologically. The first of these themes, ‘Habitat’, deals with domestic spaces and their associated content: for instance Ai Weiwei’s marble sculpture of an armchair. Notions of comfort are undermined by Ai’s unconventional choice of material, which introduces a sense of grandeur and an edge of humour. This contrasts with one of Rachel Whiteread’s signature negative-space plaster casts: here of a mattress; alluding to traces of human activity and evoking a sense of contemplation and loss.

Alexander Kosolapov – Hero, Leader, God, Painted resin (2007)

The subsequent theme, ‘Advertising and Consumerism’, focuses on the rise of consumerism witnessed in America and Britain following years of wartime and post-war austerity, as artists readily appropriated identifiable imagery from mass media, commercial advertising and popular culture. For Chinese and Russian artists, the embrace of a market-led economy raises significant tensions between the binary poles of communist idealism and western materialism. In Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism: Benetton (1992), the tension between the potent legacy of socialist propaganda and the powerful allure of advertising is easily felt. He combines the Benetton logo with a group of heroic-looking proletarians, drawing on imagery associated with the Cultural Revolution. Other works include a row of Mao-Zedong themed arcade consoles by Feng Mengbo and a vitrine filled with floating basketballs by Jeff Koons.

From there, the exhibition progresses through such themes as ‘Celebrity and Mass Media’, ‘Art History’, ‘Religion and Ideology’ and ‘Sex and the Body’. Certain iconic figures recur throughout including Mao, Marilyn, Elvis, Lenin and Stalin. One of the most haunting pieces is an installation by Sergey Shutov of 12 shrouded figures ‘worshipping’ before large slices of bread, created in wood by a fellow Russian artist, Anatoly Osmolovsky. A further room is filled with Gu Wenda’s vast installation, ‘United Nations – Man and Space’, representing national flags made from human hair. Also worth noting is Andres Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ (1987), a photograph of a crucifix in what is purported to be the artist’s own urine.

Often deliberately shocking, ‘kitsch’ and utterly bizarre, ‘Post Pop’ left me wondering what Clement Greenberg would have to say about it all – personally, I’m very glad that I didn’t have to take any of it home with me! Bringing together art from around the world, this exhibition offers viewers a rare chance to make comparisons between the work of artists from fundamentally different cultures and ideological backgrounds. It will be interesting to compare this approach by the Saatchi Gallery to the upcoming take on the movement by the Tate: ‘The World Goes Pop’, coming to Bankside in autumn 2016 .

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In the second installment of the autumn 2014 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Professor Sarah Wilson considered Centre Pompidou’s re-staging of its seminal exhibition Magiciens De La Terre on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. Wilson began the lecture by proposing that both artworks and exhibitions could change one’s understanding of time. Outside the entrance to the original Magiciens show, Neil Dawson’s steel sculptural installation Globe (1989) depicted an earth with its own pulse and tremendous fragility. It underlined some of the concerns about time and space that energised dialogues between post-structuralist theory and global visual practice in the 1980s and 1990s. Wilson’s lecture situated Magiciens, a show that brazenly sought to challenge Eurocentric values with a survey of contemporary art practice and intercultural exchange on a global scale, within a wider moment that reconceived ideas of virtuality, globalism and memory.

Wilson first placed Magiciens in a series of efforts leading up to 1989 that explored the variety of artistic exchanges in Paris during the first half of the twentieth century, including the Pompidou’s 1981 ‘Paris-Paris’ and Centre de la Vieille Charite’s 1986 exhibition La Planète affolée. These exhibitions, reflected other efforts to reimagine roles for history and the objects that express it. In this regard, one seminal exhibition was Jean Lyotard’s 1985 Les Immatériaux, a companion to his theoretical articulations of postmodernity that favored interactions between sound and technology, the charged exhibition space and its curatorial documents, rather than experiences of discrete objects. Wilson reread some of the objects in Magiciens relationally rather than discretely, celebrating lesser known works by artists including Clido Mereles, Huang Yong Ping and Ilya Kabakov. With this remembering in mind she discussed the organization of Jacques Derrida’s lecture ‘The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression’ (later renamed Archive Fever) at the Freud Museum in 1994.

Using Derrida’s idea that archives are both violent and tender, Wilson turned to the problems and successes of reconstruction of Archive Fever, Les Immateriaux and Magiciens. While the symposium ’20 Years of Archive Fever’ brought back many original participants with new webs of recollections as well as homages to Derrida and his legacies, the Les Immatériaux reconstruction at Kunstverein Düsseldorf offered clarity at the expense of the original show’s energy. To describe Magicien’s restaging, Wilson used painting metaphors. Towards anamorphosis, the show featured disorientations in scale as well as different emphases and juxtapositions. Towards vanitas, Magiciens offered poignant reminiscences of the art world of 1989 as well as an opportunity to affirm its values to a new set of viewers.

While leaving the lecture, audience members were given a poem by Miklós Erdély called ‘Time Mobius’, that spoke about processes of construction and reconstruction at the heart of learning. The last lines declare, ‘Beware of yourself/ That Readying is Ready Already’. By returning to the original circumstances of these exhibitions, and treating exhibitions and artworks as memory devices that activate multiple histories, Wilson’s lecture showed how these self-critical endeavors have been ‘ready already’ for future generations of viewers and readers.

The latest large-scale works by the British painter Jenny Saville (*1970) are for everyone who makes a fetish of delicate fingers and toes. The strong, but at the same time tender, black outlines of bodily endings and coloured heaps of flesh reveal much about the different stages of human embrace.

In 2012, Jenny Saville said in an interview with the Guardian that the older you get, the more doubtful you become – in a good way. Back then she compared being an artist to being an athlete. “You get quite fit on your toes when you’re really pushing. But then you finish a piece, and you have to start all over again.”

Even though, so far, each series of her paintings has referred to a different period of her life – which she has painterly depicted through her own physical appearance; but, she has never had to start all over again. Human flesh has always remained in the centre of her work. Interestingly, all her paintings are based on photographs since she dislikes working from life.

Her latest exhibition, which is her first solo-exhibition in London, provides more insights into her current state of mind and provides some great material for art historians. As remarkably sensational as usual, her latest works appeal not only to psychoanalysts, dermatologists, white or black colonialisers, but obviously also still to Larry Gagosian – who first showed her work in New York in 1999.

Especially the two works In the realm of the Mothers I (2012-14) and In the realm of the Mothers III (2014) echo the subject matter of the painting Odalisque (2012-14). The black male coloniser is on top of the female white colonised body. As a mother of two small children, Saville figuratively presents the physical act of how to become one, while painterly expressing a woman’s personal feelings towards the playful interaction between the nude female and the nude male body. Hence, Jenny Saville’s latest work still follows the same initial plan: Fleshing and sexing the canvas in reality.

In comparison to her earlier works, the swamping energy steaming from various colours of flesh seems to have clamed down. The flesh of her human bodies has changed its nuance and shape. In 2014, twenty-two years after graduating from Glasgow School of Art, Jenny Saville’s work is even more serious than ever, as she has moved into the realm of a post-painterly security.

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“Sound Art Curating Conference: Histories, Theories, and Practices of Sound Art” (15-16 May) brought together an interdisciplinary community of curators, artists, and academics to discuss the philosophical, aesthetic, and practical challenges of curating sound art. The conference, held across three days at Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Courtauld Institute of Art and co-chaired by Lanfranco Aceti (Sabanci University), Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths), Martin Sørengaard (Aalborg University of Copenhagen), and Julian Stallabrass (The Courtauld), fostered interdisciplinary conversations that explored sound art at its curatorial, theoretical, and sociopolitical intersections. Sound art has recently emerged in circuits of public space and art institutions, evident in exhibitions such as Revolutions Per Minute: Sound Art China (Shanghai, 2013), The Heard and the Unheard (Taiwanese Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale), and Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic (Tate Modern, London, 2012), and Soundings: A Contemporary Score (MoMA, New York, 2013). Despite its ontological absence, sound is accruing a significant presence at the forefront of contemporary art and media culture. Its elusive materiality, unstable objecthood, and relational aesthetics are expanding both the parameters of art historical discourses and the social engagements of curatorial practices, which the conference participants discussed and debated throughout a lively weekend of sonic musings.

The conference featured a variety of compelling sessions and panel discussions, examining diverse audiovisual interstices that ranged from sound art and globalized politics, the spatial considerations of curating sound, writing about sound art, the philosophy of listening and audibility, sound art and issues of conservation and copyright, sound art and the mediatization of the artist, and the relation of sound art to other forms of visual, performance, and digital art. One r session that I found particularly fascinating was “Event Making and Identity Politics Beyond the Dirty A-Word of Authenticity: The Case of ‘Sound Art’ in China”. The speakers, professors and curators from China and Taiwan, problematized the politics of curating nonwestern sound art. Their papers challenged the western, orientalized formation of a distinctly “Asian” soundscape and questioned the possibility of authenticity in the transnational politics of Asian art. Through analyzing various case studies of recent sound art exhibitions, “noise” festivals, and multimedia installations throughout China and Taiwan, the panel participants (one of whom included Dajuin Yao, curator of Revolutions Per Minute: Sound Art China) concluded that curators of nonwestern sound art must maintain a sensitivity to the geographical and material conditions of the work of sound to prevent the spectacularization of nonwestern culture that pervades globalized networks of artistic exchange. The speakers advocated that the relational intervention and social praxis of curating sound art could potentiate a reversal of the “ethnographic ear” of sonic orientalism- an idea that I found particularly compelling, as sound so potently bears the politics of nationality and identity despite its lack of a representational referent.

Another highlight was a keynote address by Atau Tanaka, Professor of Media Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. As a practicing electroacoustic musician and multimedia artist, a curator of sound and media art, and a scholar of media studies, Tanaka discussed the curatorial instability of sound in his talk, “Curating and Exhibiting Performative Systems”. Tanaka drew on specific examples from his prolific career in electronic audiovisual art to thematize both the risks and richness of sonic performances across networks and spaces, utilizing interactive systems as musical instruments. His anecdotes and artworks emphasized hybridity, complicating the distinctions of physical, virtual, immaterial, and embodied, while collapsing the epistemological divides of data, sound, and image. Tanaka’s virtuoso installations and curatorial projects posit interactivity across geographical cities and continents, and formulate temporal simultaneities of the art event, at once live, re-performed, online, aired on the radio, and networked across galleries and time zones. By expanding and experimenting with the responsiveness of the “embodied audiovisual interaction” of sound with other forms of digital and performative media, the artistic and curatorial practices that Atau Tanaka presented captivatingly gestured towards the redefinition of contemporary aesthetic experience as we know it.

The interdisciplinary conversations at this year’s “Sound Art Curating Conference: Histories, Theories, and Practices of Sound Art” reflect the exciting, albeit challenging developments of incorporating sound art into curatorial programs and academic institutions. Sound- its elusiveness, intangibility, and ephemerality- is emerging to the globalized forefront of contemporary art, exposing the productive, transmedial spaces for curating and scholarship. The conference’s discussions signified a stimulating start to the examination and curation of sound art towards its affective, sociopolitical potential.

Being familiar with Subodh Gupta’s large-scale sculptural installations, it was surprising to hear him speak at The Courtauld on 21 May– for his particularly modest, humble manner of approaching his own artworks and practice was somewhat unexpected in light of his ambitious pieces. One thing the artist and his work clearly have in common, however, is that they are immensely powerful. His latest installation at Hauser & Wirth Savile Row, What does the vessel contain, that the river does not (2012) is a huge Keralan fishing ship, hand-sewn in the traditional way and filled with the everyday Indian domestic objects that Gupta is perhaps best recognised for, steel kitchenware, amongst other pieces of furniture, broken or whole. This miscellany collected within a symbol of travel and trade seems a fitting culmination of the fourteen years of work that Gupta discussed at the seminar, for his oeuvre is inherently tied up in his personal experiences.

It was interesting to hear the anecdotes that accompany some of his most well-known pieces, as they are linked to his life – whether they were events that had taken place, conversations he had had, or simply his own thought processes – as Gupta told us, “My journey is my art.” The importance of his discovery of Duchamp was particularly touching, and one that makes so much sense when considering his sculpture – the way he elevates the quotidian to something aesthetically beautiful is quintessentially Duchampian. For example, speaking about his works Across Seven Seas and Everything is Inside (both 2004) he spoke about how he used to travel to Europe via the Gulf, and on his return journey would see Indians who were working in the Middle East with large, tightly and carefully wrapped bundles. He asked people what they had packed in there, expecting them to contain fragile and precious items; however, they usually only held gifts for the workers’ families back home. He found these bundles, as commonplace as they turned out to be, so beautiful that he created the two sculptures based on them. Aam Aadmi (2009), a collection of incredibly realistic painted bronze mangoes in a wooden crate, is similar treatment of the everyday – and as “aam aadmi” (literally translating from Hindi as “mango people”) is a colloquial term used by politicians to refer to the “common people”, it becomes a celebration not only of everyday objects but of the general masses.

Gupta then went on to talk about his early years, the beginning of his artistic career in art school in Patna, how he initially wanted to become an actor, as well as his experience of working in the Khoj workshop in 1997 – a liberating environment where the artists could work free from gallery influence for the first time. Needless to say, it was fascinating to hear the experiences that preceded such an incredible body of work.

Dr Pia Gotschaller presented her most recent findings on the history and use of masking tape in modern and contemporary art on Thursday 9 May in the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre. This lecture was the second of a three part series on the subject, as Dr Gotschaller continues her research as the Caroline Villers Research Fellow.

The terminology of the title, ‘Masking Tape: From Innovators to Early Adopters and Majority Groups,’ is borrowed from innovation theory used by product developers. Although Dr Gotschaller was not aligning her research with this theory, it was useful as a framework to understand how products are initially developed and then how people begin using these products in their daily lives. Innovators and early adopters are the first two groups to test out new products, so Dr Gotschaller borrowed this concept and applied it to artists using masking tape in their practice. Before determining who these artistic innovators and early adopters might be, it was first necessary to research the history of pressure-sensitive tape manufacture. By establishing a timeline of its development, she could then work with this chronology to see which artistic practices coincided with the product as it developed. Moreover, research of tape’s manufacture enabled a better understanding of its materiality, which provided valuable insight into the specific results the product yielded.

Dr Gotschaller then shifted her discussion to artists using masking tape in the 1930s and 1940s, including Piet Mondrian, Harry Holtzman, Charles Shaw, and Max Bill, describing the varying ways they employed pressure-sensitive tapes. For instance, while Mondrian only used masking tape to plan his De Stijl grids, tracing his compositional arrangements in charcoal before painting, Max Bill opted for Scotch magic tape for its compatibility with oil paint.

While artists working with masking tape in the late thirties and into the early forties could be considered the product’s innovators, many Concrete and Neo-Concrete artists in South America could then be described as early adopters. It is likely that these artists were exposed to Bill’s work in the 1950s when he exhibited in Brazil and consequently incorporated pressure-sensitive tape into their practices. A recent exhibition in Madrid, Concrete Invention, brought together the work of many of these Argentinean, Brazilian, and Venezuelan artists, along with works by Albers, Bill, and Mondrian, so that Dr Gotschaller could compare works of those artists who used tape and those who did not.

The next phase of research for Dr Gotschaller and her team will entail testing individuals’ perceptions of paintings made with masking tape and those made without, the hypothesis being that people will be able to tell with relative certainty which method an artist used. This then calls into question what the further implications of using masking tape, the motivations of its innovators and early adopters, and the almost subconscious aesthetic effect of mechanistically straight lines in relation to growing urbanism and Modernism itself. But for now, research remains in its initial stages, exploring and discovering the process of artists who used an everyday material that we often take for granted.

Toronto-based visual artist Annie MacDonell gave a compelling lecture-meets-artist’s talk, discussing her work in an open-forum manner at the Research Forum on 1 May.

She began by reading her interpretation of two pivotal postmodernist texts, Craig Owen’s ‘Photography en abyme’ and Rosalind Krauss’s ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde,’ both of which have largely informed MacDonell’s practice recently, as she has begun to question notions of authenticity and originality in her own art making and in contemporary artistic practice in general. When these texts were written, photography became an important allegorical device for theorists to employ when trying to unravel some of the impenetrable issues of postmodern discourse in its early days. To some extent, MacDonell has translated this methodology into an artistic practice that incorporates photography, film, sculpture, and installation.

MacDonell’s exhibition ‘Originality and the Avant Garde (on art and repetition)’ at Mercer Union in Toronto includes all of these elements of her practice, with a selection of five photographs as well as a mirrored structure the size of her studio. The space within the structure functions as a screening room for a short film, which also reveals itself as a camera obscura: as the film comes to an end, the images from the gallery space appear as projections on the wall.

The mirror is crucial in relation to the texts by Owens and Krauss, as it is the surface that causes an abyss in its endless repetition. This can be understood quite literally, as light reflects on the mirror in a camera, which MacDonell physically translates into the gallery space with the mirrored structure and the camera obscura. Then, there is another layer of mirrored space, as the photographs themselves include mirrors or other reflective surfaces, creating a chain of projections that have no beginning or end. It is this aspect of the mirror that informs MacDonell’s understanding of appropriation. All of the images pictured in MacDonell’s photographs were found in an image archive in Toronto, where, over the years, various archivists have determined categories and sourced images from an indiscriminate array of periodicals, organizing a vast amount of visual information in an almost entirely arbitrary way. The idea of an original source becomes obfuscated in this mass of imagery, and even further removed through its appropriation by MacDonell.

MacDonell confessed that her work is ‘self-explanatory to a fault,’ but actually, it is not as obvious as it may seem. In the short film included in the exhibition, a young man implicates the viewer, engaging in a theoretical diatribe about the very ideas that are explored in the exhibition: originality and authenticity. His confidence in these ideas will resonate with viewers of MacDonell’s work, as its presentation is so in line with its conceptual underpinnings that it verges on becoming too obvious, too self-referential. But his confidence also reveals his naïveté, reminding the viewer that what appears most obvious may be more complex than it initially appears.

In February, I attended the Utopia III conference held through the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre. The conference was the third in a series addressing the theme of ‘utopia’ within Russian art, with each focusing on a different time period; Utopia III focused on contemporary art. This was the first of the conference series I was able to attend, and it left me regretting that I had missed the previous two.

Days later, I still found myself thinking about the idea of utopia, both as it concerned Soviet art and as it connected to other realms of my academic and non-academic interests— particularly, my penchant for reading dystopian novels, which normally constitutes a wholly non-academic escape. I found the keynote speaker, Mikhail Epstein, particularly intriguing in this respect. His topic, ‘The Philosophical Underpinnings of Russian Conceptualism’, drew parallels for me between the concept of the utopian he described, which he argued was grounded in philosophical ideas predating Soviet ideology, and the philosophical exercise that seems to be at the heart of many dystopian novels. Central to the genre, of course, is the desire to posit the ramifications of Soviet-era politics and totalitarian moments of 20th century history, but also often motifs drawn from classical-era philosophies of government.

Though by a strict definition, ‘utopian’ and ‘dystopian’ are opposing ideas, they exist in tension, with the second reliant upon the first to exist. Both are united in a joint exercise in constructing an alternate version of reality: one optimistically plausible, the other existing in order to identify the fundamental flaws in the former. Though the term ‘dystopia’ was not investigated at this conference, I often detected the blurry line between the two. One example, used by multiple speakers, was Ilya Kabakov’s “The Man Who Flew Into Space from his Apartment.” This installation artwork depicts the aftermath of the apartment belonging to the eponymous man in space. His cramped living quarters, wallpapered with Soviet propaganda, are now furnished by the aftermath of his successful space mission. Through the work’s highly narrative composition, the viewer is able to infer the action that preceded the current tableau, while simultaneously detecting the cracks in a supposedly utopian Soviet society: the propaganda feels suffocating, and must be escaped.

Epstein proposed that conceptual art is the visual counterpart to philosophy, and has been understood this way by some of the artists themselves. This proved somewhat controversial in the Q&A portion following his talk, although I found his argument fairly convincing. In my understanding of dystopian literature the connection seems apt: conceptual art, like literature, becomes a method of exploring abstract ideas in a concrete sense, as if running a simulation to prove exactly where grand theories, in our imperfect reality, will fall short.